With his four novels, Fog and Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs, and Search History, Eugene Lim, employing nimble mashups of philosophy, genre fiction, and keen sociological observation, has gained a reputation as one of experimental fiction’s most dazzling practitioners.
Lim’s writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Baffler, Granta, Dazed, Fence, Little Star, The Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, Gigantic, Your Impossible Voice, The Coming Envelope, Everyday Genius, Vestiges and elsewhere. Pessimist of the intellect by night; by day, he’s house librarian at the Charles Xavier School for the Greatly Responsibled. He runs Ellipsis Press and lives in Jackson Heights, NY, with Joanna and Felix.
Ru Marshall spoke to him recently in Jackson Heights, Queens.
✶
Ru Marshall: In all your novels, most radically in The Strangers, you play with taken-for-granted concepts of character and separate, individual identity. Characters merge, Borgesian mazes are constructed. How did you arrive at this approach?
Eugene Lim: I often think of a quote, which I think is from Harry Mathews. He says something like: You don’t need much for a character, just a name and a haircut. In fiction, there are tags—like a name or a haircut or a pronoun—around ideation that make a “character.” When one realizes how this operates, it can open you up to how dependent and porous the notion of “character” is. To extend the logic, it leads one to the idea that the very notion of identity isn’t necessarily what it appears to be, that it’s contingent and emerging. I think this unstable or flexible aspect of character, for me, began with the serial monologists in The Strangers. And I should admit these ideas of identity probably came from Buddhism, which I had started thinking more and more about.
When was this?
Starting around ’99 or 2000. In my mid-twenties I struggled, perhaps typically, with what it means to be an adult. I started visiting different practice centers, and I ended up going to one that was started by a Korean teacher named Zen Master Seung Sahn. Many mystical or meditative traditions have the practitioner ask a basic question about the self: “Who am I?” And the conclusion one comes to, fundamentally, is that there is no self—or that the idea of the self is contingent or, to use Thich Nhat Hanh’s language, the self is a phenomena of inter-being. You come to see how the self doesn’t exist independently but is an emerging creation of changing contexts. In my fiction, I think that translates into an exploration of theories of mind and a willingness to be slippery with the notion of character.
There’s a sense, in your books, that the selves—or the characters—are just vehicles through which ideas travel.
To some extent. To create fiction, you have to constellate ideas around some of these tags. Let’s say you start with the bare minimums. Names, haircuts. Then you start attaching dialogue and, almost helplessly, giving certain of these figments particular points of view. Over time, I was surprised and tickled to see that some of these names-plus-haircuts had started developing personalities! That is, gradually, over chapters and even across books, “characters” that I didn’t purposefully imbue with any particular worldview, suddenly had them. It was a reverse engineering of the technology of character.
Does that apply when we speak of someone’s character in “real life,” when we talk about identity, about the self? It seems you’re questioning not just the conventional representation of the self in fiction, but what the self is in the world.
I think so. I don’t know if it’s the goal of my work to reveal this idea about identity, but, for me, it is a guiding and fundamental belief of what the world is. All the personalities we put on, all our ideas of who we are, at work or with our family and friends, or to ourselves, are fictions about who we are.
Would you say writers coming from an immigrant experience have a heightened sense of self as something that’s constructed?
Yes. In the sense that if you’re from any excluded group, you most likely have a heightened sense of how the self is constructed. Because you are outside—and you are therefore better equipped to see how “inside” and “outside” are made.
In Dear Cyborgs, and elsewhere in your work, characters often debate what it means to be an artist in a historical moment in which every attempt to interrogate power seems to almost immediately be coopted. Protests quickly become toothless, art is commodified, becomes yet another instance of alienated spectacle. And, due to the realities of the marketplace, invariably depends on some form of exploited labor. How should the writer resist this process, negotiate this conundrum?
This question is as much a spiritual one as a political or practical one. Dear Cyborgs I think is largely an expression of that emerging (or perhaps now permanent) feeling of being without any political agency, about that despairing feeling that arises when one considers the odds and powers aligned against effective protest. Its opening pages half-quote the famous vow, often associated with Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect; Optimism of the will.” Dear Cyborgs posits a few ways, usually not particularly noble, for the artist, to admit defeat but live as a parasite off the hegemonic system, undermining the totalizing market-driven ideology as much as possible without drawing attention or becoming crushed. A somewhat limited and cowering position. From another point of view, it’s a matter of faith and fortune, e.g. I remember Noam Chomsky saying he would have never predicted a ragtag occupation of a public plaza near Wall Street would come to ignite a conversation about wealth inequality. So it becomes, like art, a matter of destiny, dedication, inspiration, desperation, and timing.
Speaking of timing: I’m curious how this idea of contingent personhood intersects with your interest in standup comedy. Which runs through your writing. Is writing a form of standup?
Comedians often talk about “writing on stage,” and I started thinking about these odd monologists. I realized that standup—that constrained, often grotesque commercial artform—is a performance of fiction. The idea of structuring a novel around a series of monologues started to grow in my mind. In The Strangers, there’s a very literal moment in the beginning of the novel where the protagonist says he’s an artist who “talks standing up.” In Search History, I was especially thinking about Pat Morita and the history of Asian American comics—who are working in this commercial medium for a historically white audience. There’s a story about Pat Morita, a Japanese American, who unexpectedly found himself headlining a show for the 25th anniversary of the survivors of Pearl Harbor—and how he still got his laughs. I’m interested in how artists like Morita survived, how comics have to deform their selves to succeed, but also how they managed to do what they loved in a hostile environment.
There’s a character who recurs in all your novels.
Frank Exit.
He morphs considerably from book to book.
I often think the Frank Exit of each of the books is a different Frank Exit. In Fog & Car, his first appearance, he is a pun: both a suicide and a frank escape via story from the collapsing dichotomy of hazy fog and mechanical transportation. Sometimes, he may be a different character within the same book.
He’s always the lost friend, although he’s lost in different ways. Loss seems an especially important theme in Search History.
Search History was largely about grief. The month after Dear Cyborgs came out, my best friend died from cancer. I didn’t want to write about that directly. But it seemed inescapable to me.
Search History does have passages which appear to be direct memoir. At least they’re labeled as such, as “autobiographical interludes.”
I keep playing with that. I think it’s not dissimilar to Sebald’s use of photographs. There’s an intrusion of reality in the books, but the auto-fictional conceit allows you to disguise it, in a way similar to that in which Sebald manipulated his photographs.
Another central question in Search History—which starts with a robot named César Aira—is: “can AI write a novel?” Where do you land on that?
A lot of writing is formulaic. Take much of sports or financial reporting. The language and data can be slotted in. AI is already doing that. It’s just a notch up to formulaic genre fiction. But beyond that, there’s a shape to art that currently I think is necessarily and very human. The novel is something pretty human, actually. At least, that’s my idea of the novel. It’s something written by a person. Here’s a tautology or a teleology: A machine may be able to write a good novel—but when it does, I think the machine will have become a person.
How would you define a novel?
For me, it’s a presentation, maybe a deformed, complex representation, of a person’s soul between two covers. The epigraph in Search History is from Fran Lebowitz. “To me, a book is the closest thing there is to a human being.” I had a friend that reversed that and said: “Actually, a human being is the closest thing to a novel.” This goes back to how the self is constructed. Because a novel is a constructed self, a personhood, a point of view that monologues. These “natural language processing” machines like GPT-3, for instance, are devices that create speech, that make language. I’ve heard them described as auto-correct on steroids. These AI are trained on ginormous amounts of information in the form of our speech-acts found on the internet. If they take this enormous amount of information and then reproduce our language convincingly enough, does that qualify as personhood?
Another question might be: who’s the “we” behind that “our”? Whose language is being reproduced? Autocorrect always feels like it’s coming to kill my soul. It’s a conformity-enhancing machine. If AI is autocorrect on steroids, novelists like you are doing the opposite.
Sure. Auto-correct is an educated (perhaps miseducated) guess. And can therefore be wrong, be “misaligned,” create misreading. There are famous cases now where AI, using prejudiced training data, simply reproduce those biases. What I really think, and which is basically said in Search History, is that the current architecture of “deep learning” cannot graduate to successful novel writing, i.e. sentience—but we barely know and can conceive how we come up with the language out of our mouths. So I think the question is open.
✶✶✶✶
Ru Marshall is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared in ACM. Their biography American Trickster: The Hidden Worlds of Carlos Castañeda received the 2016 Hazel Rowley Prize from the Biographers International Organization and has been optioned for film / TV by Hybrid Cinema. Their novel, A Separate Reality, was nominated for a Lambda Award for debut fiction. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and their writing has appeared in Salon, N + 1 Online, Evergreen Review, The Barcelona Review, Your Impossible Voice, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other publications. Their art has been exhibited at Participant Inc., Studio 10 Gallery, Cathouse Proper, Baxter Street, White Columns, Art in General, Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Richard Anderson Fine Arts, Caren Golden Gallery, and across the United States, Europe, and South America.
✶
As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. This income helps us keep the magazine alive.
Another Chicago Magazine 